access to moderator tools

What is moderation?

As one of our most experienced users, we're counting on you to guide the community and lead by example.

You can...

View deleted posts

Cast delete and undelete votes on questions

Access moderator tools

Edit tags inline

...which collectively allow you to help the elected community moderators in monitoring the site and helping to clean up messes.

Viewing deleted posts

You now have privileged access to posts that have been removed, either by their authors, by users with access to moderator tools, by moderators, or by the system.

Use this privilege wisely:

Make sure what is being deleted should have been deleted, and bring unnecessary or harmful deletions to the attention of the community and/or moderator team.

Watch for signs of abuse being obscured by deletion.

Don't abuse this privilege to stir up trouble when someone has wisely decided to remove a problematic post.

Deleting questions

Users with this reputation level can delete closed questions.

When should I delete questions?

Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be flagged and deleted.

Before voting to delete, please check that there are no good answers; if so, then the question should be flagged for moderator attention as a potential merge candidate. We don't like to lose great answers!

Also, be cautious when deleting questions closed as duplicates; they can serve as a signpost, directing users to useful answers on another question.

It takes 3 votes, minimum, to delete a closed question. However, the number of delete votes required scales to the number of votes on the question and all its answers.

You must wait for a question to be closed for 2 days before you can vote for deletion. This restriction is removed for trusted users when a post scores -3 or lower. If you feel a post should be deleted despite having lots of votes or for being new, please flag it for community moderator attention.

What happens when a post is deleted?

Once a post has been deleted, it will disappear for all users except developers, moderators, and other fellow users with this privilege. However, deleted posts can be undeleted by casting undelete votes. Once a post has 3 undelete votes, it will no longer be deleted.

Access these tools by clicking the review link in the top bar, and then the Tools link in the header:

If you poke around in /tools, you'll quickly notice that most of what's found there isn't directly actionable - it's informational! What you do with that information is up to you: hopefully, you've been around long enough now that you have some idea of how you want the site to be run, and are able to make good use of the information presented. For instance:

Find problems that've been overlooked and fix them if you can, or bring them to the attention of the moderators if you can't. The stats page is a gold mine for outliers that might benefit from a bit of attention from a wise, aged site veteran such as yourself.

Find awesome stuff that reminds you of why you like coming here. The stats page is a good one for this too.

Sanity-check the stuff that other people are doing, and offer guidance and correction where necessary: new tags, new answers, suggested edits, questions being migrated or closed, posts being deleted... Outside of /tools, you also get a full history of actions taken by others in /review by clicking the history tab in any queue, which can be helpful in identifying problems there as well.

Finally, as a high-reputation member of the site your opinions likely carry quite a bit of weight with your peers: if you see a trend that you think is worth calling attention to, don't hesitate to do it - having access to more data makes it easier to back up your assertions.

Inline tag editing

Finally, you now have the ability to do inline tag edits on questions. Hover your mouse next to the tags and you should see a "edit tags" button:

This allows you to quickly retag questions that need it, which you'll find especially useful combined with the list of new tags on the stats page.